Hearing & Speech Sciences
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Browsing Hearing & Speech Sciences by Subject "agrammatism"
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Item "Go aphasia!": Examining the efficacy of Constraint-Induced Language Therapy for individuals with agrammatic aphasia(2008-08-25) Virion, Christine; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recently, high intensity short-term therapy with a heavy emphasis on verbal language (called constraint induced language therapy, CILT) has gained momentum in aphasiology. However, the entire extent of its applicability and limitations has not been fully studied, especially with regard to specific aphasic deficits. This thesis sought to: 1) determine the efficacy of the originally published CILT protocol (o-CILT) with a deficit specific population (four individuals with agrammatic aphasia) and 2) examine the potential effect of a modified CILT protocol, which additionally focused on grammatical accuracy (g-CILT). Results revealed differences between the performance of individuals with agrammatism in this study and previously published CILT data. Findings also demonstrated that participants receiving g-CILT produced more significant gains on tests of aphasia severity and grammaticality, while individuals receiving o-CILT showed more highly significant changes on discourse measures of grammaticality. This paper suggests that, for individuals with agrammatism, CILT in its original form may not evince significant changes on tests of aphasia severity and grammatical production and a grammatical modification appears to increase the efficacy of CILT.Item Verb naming treatment for individuals with agrammatic aphasia: Efficacy data(2009) Graham, Lauren Elaine; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Some individuals with aphasia present with agrammatism, which is characterized by short, syntactically ill-formed utterances and a paucity of verbs. These patients demonstrate marked difficulty with verb production both in confrontation naming and sentence production tasks. However, previous studies of syntax-based verb treatments have failed to show generalization to naming of untrained verbs. Therefore, the present study investigated the efficacy of a verb naming treatment that focused on purely semantic features of verbs. This research examined whether training semantic features of a verb class would facilitate within- and between-class generalization. Two male patients with agrammatic aphasia participated, with treatment aimed at training cut and contact verb classes. While only one participant (Participant B) improved in naming accuracy of trained cut verbs, neither participant displayed within-class generalization to untrained cut verbs. Only Participant B received training with contact verbs and demonstrated a trend of within-class generalization. Both participants improved on two standardized measures of aphasia performance, indicating that this treatment may have provided a generalized retrieval strategy for verb features. These results have implications for verb naming treatments, including stimuli-specific factors (i.e., number of verb features, verb frequency) and participant-specific factors (i.e., premorbid education, phonological vs. semantic deficit). Implications for future treatment research are also discussed.